Organizing for Year End

As each school year draws to a close, home school mommas everywhere scurry to get themselves organized.

• Is my school year on track? Will we be done as planned so we can take the summer off?
• For those who get an annual review, it is time to get those portfolios ready and schedule that portfolio review.
• Form those home schooling high school, it is time to calculate grades and update that transcript.
• What are we doing next school year? What materials do I need to purchase?
• Are there items I will never use again? Is it time to declutter? Do I sell them, give them away, or throw them away?
•  Is there a Homeschool Convention in my near future? What will my focus be? What do I want to buy? How much money do I have to spend?

This year my focus changes.

• Celebrate graduation: party, cake, photos, diploma
• What are the next steps for college?
• When is the next college bill due?
• Help son get a dorm room selected;
• Will my son be able to get a summer job this year?
• Declutter, declutter, declutter: Sell, give, toss.
• Home maintenance tasks/renovations/repairs
• Declutter, declutter, declutter
• Get caught up on neglected house cleaning
• Declutter, declutter, declutter...

Beyond the fact that my son is graduating, are you seeing a theme here? 

In May I leave home schooling behind. I started home schooling in January of 1992. For all practical purposes we might as well say Fall of 1991. That means I've home schooled 27 years.

So this year the topic of "Organization" no longer means scurry to plan and purchase for next year. My first order of business, at this point, is purge most evidence of home schooling from my household.

I recently boxed more than 15 boxes of school materials and headed to a home school used curriculum fair. It was only one hour long. I sold $130 worth of stuff and came home with ONE BOX LESS than I left with.

So now I'm working to figure out if I take the time to sell, or do I just find a quick way to get rid of stuff. Hubby wants me to just be done with all this stuff. On the other hand, I know there is money there to apply towards college text books, and I want to take the time to try to sell. We'll see.

So this week includes:

• Tub man comes to resurface tub tomorrow;
  
• Adjuster comes to see what damage the recent wind storm did to our exterior;
• Tomorrow is the day my son gets to select his dorm room/room mate;
• Make an appointment for my son's physical;
• Make a date to get my annual portfolio review done, and
• My son needs to fill out the Air Force ROTC Application

 Next week will include:

• Having tub man resurface tub #2 
  
• Listing some of the books for sale;
• Senior photos being taken;
• I can't even think what else right now...

So that's what "Organization" plans look like in my life right now. What do your spring organization plans look like this year?

CHSH-Teach.com - A Schoolhouse Crew Review

In July I learned I would be part of the Crew reviewing CHSH-Teach.com (which I had previously known as Christian HomeSchool Hub). 

I had already had a free membership at Christian HomeSchool Hub, but now I had the opportunity to review their premium product, CHSH Download Club! 

 I had always wanted access to their  but couldn't justify paying for it because I already had everything I needed! It was just a "want". Now I got to see it! Happy dance!

I quickly logged in and perused the materials available for download. On entering the page, it was difficult initially to know what I needed to do to find the materials on the site.

I did a few searches, but eventually I figured out to scroll down on this first page, which takes you to tables of choices.

My only student is in 11th Grade, so while this site is jam-packed with wonderful materials, much of it I do not need. My initial interest was in Spanish and in materials for organization. The Spanish is in the above section under "Languages". As I scrolled further down, I found a section of materials for "High School" and a section for "Organization".

I went to "Spanish" first and downloaded a huge selection of Spanish learning materials. It is an amazing collection of PDF format files.

I went next to the 2nd choice under "Organization" and download the contents. This was the section I wanted to focus on for my review period. As I looked over the contents, my hopes were deflated as I saw the entire section was geared toward the 2015-2016 school year.

I wrote to the CHSH-Teach Owner, Lynda Ackert and asked her if there was any possibility of getting the "Forms for planning and record keeping" for the 2016-2017 school year any time soon. She apologized that she hadn't gotten it uploaded yet and said it would be up by the end of the next day. It was! And she even wrote back to me to make sure I knew it was up, which is amazing. She gets five gold stars for customer service!

So I downloaded the record keeping packet for the current school year. She updated the packet so that you don't have to download the entire zip-file if you just want specific pages, which is wonderful! The packet contains so many different files there is no way I am going to list them all here. I'd like to tell you my favorites.

I forgot to mention that I also downloaded the current calendars in the "Organization" section for the current school year. My brain was thinking of that as part of the record keeping packet. There is a variety of styles of planner pages, and I found a set in the format I like to use. I already have a planner for my son, but I might set up a set of school planner pages just for scheduling use of items I am reviewing. It would help me keep on track.

I like and needed the sheet for tracking student attendance. I also love the Daily Grade Log and the High School Course of Study Check List. There is a transcript form for all twelve years of school. I'm going to suggest to the Owner a High School Transcript form as well. I rarely graded work before high school.

So that's my focus on the Organization materials. I love them. I wanted to mention a few things about the Spanish materials as well. I love the illustrations for the lower level Spanish learning, like words for animals. There is a full book download for Spanish I for both the student and the teacher. The book makes reference to the student listening to the pronunciation tapes, but these are not available, so I guess this Spanish I would best be used by a teacher who knows Spanish well enough to know the pronunciations. I don't - I am still learning as well.

So CHSH-Teach.com is a fantastic resource for you to consider and I have barely scratched the surface. So in order for you to get an idea of more that is available through CHSH-Teach.com, you should click the button below and read additional reviews by other members of the Review Crew! Thanks!

Educating the WholeHearted Child

I was so delighted when I learned that I had been selected to review Educating the WholeHearted Child! And when it arrived at my door, I was not disappointed! This is one instance where I wanted to judge a book by its cover! I knew this would be a great book!

So, I received this wonderful book -- it has a wealth of information in it... it is a book that should be pored over, pondered, savored, read at length and re-read... We were given this incredible encyclopedia of home schooling, and we were given about a month to get an opinion of it and tell our friends. ...::sigh:: There is so much to this book I haven't had a chance to check out yet. (It has 376 pages!) I feel like I have gone to a Dutch Smorgasbord, walked in the door, and immediately had to pick and choose what I would sample, because there was no way I could get to everything!

So, what I am saying is that I am giving you my opinion, but so far I have dabbled only in the smallest part of this wonderful book, ...but that will have to do.

Clay and Sally Clarkson are a parents of four adult children whom they home schooled all the way. They are both authors of books to help home schoolers. Clay Clarkson wrote Educating the WholeHearted Child with his wife Sally's assistance, and it was published by Apologia Ministries. Together they are clearly a plethora of information!

So to get started, I opened Educating the WholeHearted Child to the Table of Contents to decide where to start. So much to read; so little time! The main content of the book is broken into four sections, which are further subdivided into chapters. Before these sections there is a sizeable Preface and Introduction, and following these sections there is a Post Script and an extensive section of Resources.

SECTION 1, HOME, looked like information I would save for later. I am not just starting out, and my son is not even at the beginning, so much of the material in Section 1 looked like material I would have wanted to read 20 years ago, or at least 7 years ago, when I was starting out with my son. I will certainly go back and look at it, but didn't have time to read it for this review. But guess what? You can read Chapter 1 if you want to... give it a click!

SECTION 2, LEARNING would have been a great place for me to start, because it explains the entire concept of Clarkson's "WholeHearted Learning" perspective. I did not start there, though, because chapter titles in Section 3 were calling me. So, like Section 1, I will go back and read Section 2 later.

SECTION 3, METHODS was definitely intriguing to me, as the titles were right where I am in my homeschooling. I skipped Chapter 10 -- The Study of the Bible, since between Awanas and regular readings we kinda have our system in place on that one. So I started the book in Chapter 11 -- The Study of the Basics, and dove in head first with a highlighter in hand.

So, I've been reading and reading. But now my review is due, and I still feel I've barely scratched the surface! Even so, this is what I can tell you...

This book is a vast storehouse of information. It is worth every penny of its price. It is a book I will return to again and again. I can't wait, even now, to get back to it and read more.

Things that I have liked loved while reading this book:
• a refreshing of my spirit for the task we have undertaken and for what lies ahead;
• reassurance that I am doing well in certain areas;
• encouragement and ideas on how to do differently in areas where I am not doing so well;
• new ideas to inject breaths of fresh air into our homeschool.

Now, here's what I noticed on the downside... Clay Clarkson writes in a way that can come across sounding as if he knows what is right, and therefore his way is the way you should do things. (He doesn't say this outright, but his writing style leaves me with that feeling.) There are some areas where, even if his methods are the best, not all of us can implement them.

One reason some of his opinions might be written as they are, rubbing me the wrong way, could be because I am acutely aware of the way variations in state homeschooling laws have an affect on the freedom (lack thereof) that some of us have to do things the way he suggests.

What I am referring to, specifically here, is this: the Clarksons live in Colorado. I used to live in Colorado. The homeschooling law in Colorado is wonderful and freeing. You are required to register to state that you are homeschooling (I can't remember, it might be every year that you inform the state...), promise that you will homeschool an average of at least 4 hours a day for 180 school days, and starting in Grade 3 your children will take standardized testing every other year. That's it. That's all they require.

I no longer live in Colorado. I now live in a state where I will be reviewed once or twice a year either by my local county school's representative, or I can pay and be reviewed by an approved private school. Either way, I am required to demonstrate that my child received “[R]egular, thorough instruction" in Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, Language Arts [which then means I have to show teaching in Grammar, Spelling, Handwriting, Vocabulary, Writing (as in compositions)], Art, Music, Physical Education, and Health. Then, because my private oversight is through a Christian school, I need to keep documentation of what we do for Bible training. So, all this documentation needs to be well kept, constantly organized, reduced, and prepared (usually in the form of a portfolio) to present for review once or twice a year. And documenting on my daily lesson planner, for instance, that child gave oral narration of the reading assignment will not cut it for this portfolio (depending on the age of the child and the bent of the particular reviewer) -- I have to have a paper trail. In other words, if there is oral narration, I myself then need to write up the narration so that there is documentation that the child did the work.

So, I am reigning myself in here -- it would be soooooo easy to get off on a tangent and start complaining about the laws in the state where I live, but I will stop now and try to just be thankful that they are better here now than they used to be, and to be thankful that it is legal to homeschool here at all.

Back to the review. So, some of the great ideas and methods that Clay Clarkson was writing were immediately being rewritten in my head to translate into more work, if I were to implement them, due to my need to comply with state laws in a documented way.

And some of his opinions I just disagreed with. One example would be a section he wrote about Spelling. He made certain comments that just irked me in the area of teaching Spelling. And I think all that this really amounts to, as I think about it, is that he has certain ideas about Spelling that he has become convinced of over his years of homeschooling, and I have certain ideas about the subject that I have developed over the years, and we just disagree. For example, he said, in answer to the question, "Should I continue teaching phonics in order to teach spelling?"

“The bigger question, of course, is whether of not your child should be required to learn and master all the phonics rules for their own sake. The purpose of phonics is to teach reading, so if your child is reading well, it’s perfectly alright to put aside the phonics, even if you never made it through all the rules. When your children are writing easily and well at around nine or ten years old, you can review the rules of phonics with them then, but only if they are helpful. Phonics will not magically turn your child into a good speller. If misspelling patterns emerge in your child’s writing that reflect phonics rules, then study those rules with them if that makes sense.” Where this didn't work for me was with a child with a Learning Disability, and in this instance the methods I was using would have worked in conjunction with the LD program that child went through, however she and I had both become discouraged and had given up on it at that point.

This is an example where I just plain disagree. I consider phonics and Spelling to be very seriously entwined, and I teach Spelling through the phonics of the phonograms. I also find that the better the child knows the "phonics rules" (which I consider the Spelling Rules), the better he will be able to read and spell.

Summary: This book is definitely worth it. There is an enormous storehouse of information and inspiration here, that makes reading it clearly worth it, even if you need to take certain sections of it with a grain of salt. As with just about any resource, educational, inspirational, spiritual, or otherwise: take what works for you, and just read past what you don't agree with or which doesn't work for you. The good of this book way out-weighs any objections, and I can't wait to get back into it and read more, more, more. This is a book that can be used either to read slowly, savor, take notes, and ponder, or to pick up, quick, for, "I wonder how or what I should have Janie memorize... This book is a serious support for the Christian parent, in general, and especially for the Christian homeschooling parent. I love this book! From me it gets two thumbs up!

Summary information:
• Product name: Educating the WholeHearted Child.
• Author(s): Clay Clarkson, with Sally Clarkson
• Product price: $22.00
• Available from: Apologia Bookstore
• Publisher: Apologia Educational Ministries
• Additional resources available from publisher: Science curriculum; worldview resources; resources for parents; tools for parents; online Apologia Academy; and inspirational Apologia Live Conferences.

Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion. I received no other compensation (other than the book), and this page contains my honest opinions.

This has been a TOS Homeschool Crew Review.

Throw me a bone! Leave me a comment! I love comments!

Our Classroom

Summer is almost half way over. You've rested. You have attended your homeschool convention; you have purchased your curriculum. And now you are plotting out your next school year. You will plot out your 36-week daily-lesson-planner, and you will organize your School Room. What does it look like?

Well, here is what ours looks like.

The center of our classroom is momma's rocking chair, where I sit and do read-alouds.

The books to the left of the picture are the various books we are using in our homeschool -- I can clearly see the Comstock Handbook of Nature Study there... While I read, my son might sit on the couch (below), or sometimes we might snuggle up there together. Sometimes he might work on the coffee table drawing, or putting a jigsaw puzzle together, or working on Legos:

Facing the couch is our "Entertainment Center", which contains television, video player, dvd player, and wii game machine. We use the wii for our regular physical activity. But we also use that spot, at times, to lean our large map board which has, on one side, a United States map, and on the other side a world map (below):

When it is time to present math concepts, demonstrate cursive, or present new spelling, vocabulary, or Latin/Greek roots, I have a white board mounted right on my bookshelf (beside the one in the rocking chair photo). Below the white board I have a magnetic board that we use with All About Spelling magnetic letters:

For exercises that require handwriting, we use the coffee table shown above, but sometimes we move upstairs to the dining room table:

And once we are upstairs, I often finish my reading sitting in my more comfortable chair:

But my favorite section of our classroom is the great outdoors!

So, now it's your turn! Tell me about your "School Room"!

Organization

I don't love organizing and I am not accomplished at it, but I am trying. But I have been homeschooling for 20 years, and I have to organize just to stay in the game. In my 20 years I started with First Grade Learning at Home, by Ann Ward.  From there I transitioned into KONOS unit studies, still staying very inexpensive, using lots of library books. I kicked around eclectic for awhile, buying yearly whatever publisher I could afford that year. Then I used Tapestry of Grace for eight years as each of my daughter went through four years of high school.

During my Tapestry years I bought books, lots and lots of books. For four years I bought (and borrowed from the library) books and books and books. And then daughter #2 got to high school, and the Tapestry book requirements changed, and again I bought books, lots and lots of books. She graduated, and the year she graduated my 3rd child started kindergarten.

For JD, as he was such a young child, Tapestry didn't work. I knew I would eventually return to Tapestry, but for one year I started (K) with Sonlight, and somewhere along the way transitioned to  Ambleside Online, with more book purchases.  Now I'm finally ready to transition back to Tapestry, but no longer own the editions I started with (known to the TOGlers as "Pre-Publication edition" and "Classic", but have purchased a digital edition (DE) which I believe is also known as "Redesign".  So, once again, the books called for have changed. (Books go out of print; new books are published...)  In addition, being a book lover and a member of Paperbackswap,  I have every intention of keeping track of reading lists from Ambleside Online for the titles they are using that I might plug into TOG, as well as keeping an eye on other publishers' lists, like Sonlight, Beautiful Feet Books, Winter Promise, and eventually probably Veritas Press.

But I digress. This post is about organization. Here is how I organize.

First, Tapestry books:
On my Tapestry bookshelf wall I have two (I wish I had 3 or 4, but not enough room) bookshelves that are 72" high, 18" deep and 36" wide.  The shelves on each unit are set at the same level so it looks like one continuous shelf at each level from left of left unit to right of right unit.

Top shelf contains my TOG Y1 binders and all the books for Year 1. I currently have only an 11 year old, so all the rhetoric books are actually at the back, as are the dialectic, with the LG and UG at the front.  Shelf 2 contains Year 2, same thing. Shelf 3 on the left contains biographies; on the right always ends up containing non-TOG items -- family photo albums, sewing books, old year books, Time/Life books, National Geographic books -- heavy stuff -- cause those shelfs are the heavy-duty, can-hold-a-lot-of-weight shelves. shelf 4 holds my Year 3 binders and books, and shelf 5  holds all my Year 4 binders and books. Now remember, these are two rows deep! I have all four levels. Notice -- no hard copy of TOG on the Year 3 (4th) shelf...

I will be teaching Year 3 in the fall, so I have begun to go through my Year 3 books that have, predictably, gotten into no particular order as the years have gone by since I used them last for TOG.  I sit at the bookshelves with my reading list ready and go back and forth from booklist to books, putting the books in order from Week 1 to Week 36. I have orange dots on Year 3 books, and I have tried to mark "Week 1" or whatever on the dot in sharpie pen before I taped it to the book to keep it there.  I am scurrying right now because my books for UG/D are the books called for in "Classic" or "Original" or "Guinnea Pig" TOG, and they don't match my copy of "DE", and I really need to plug in, substitute, and remark the dots on the spines and such. (We originally did "Old Yeller" in Week 3-4, when the story actually took place around 1860, so it should definitely be more around Week 20 or just before the Civil War books.) I also am making notations on my reading list printout of books I am reading instead of what is on the DE, cause I just can't see buying new books for a new edition when I already went through this once for the guinea pig co-op of TOG, a second time for the Classic design of TOG, and am now using the Redesign when I already had the books for that level for that year plan for two previous versions... Can't do it...

Out in my less-than-organized family room (a room away from the bookshelves), I have another set of two bookshelves that are beside where I sit when we do school. They are also 72" high, 14" or so deep, and 36" wide. On this set of shelves I keep the current school books (for Math, Science, Handwriting, Spelling, Health, Art, etc., blah, blah, blah).  There is space on these shelves for current reading books to be stored when they are not being used (weekends, end of day, etc.). Those shelves currently need to be sorted, but the contain books we've been using in the school year we just ended (were using Ambleside Online), and books we are in the process of reading (summer reading).  I have actually nailed nails into these bookshelves (old shelves, prefab wood), and I have a white board hanging over the top shelves of the left unit that I use when explaining math, phonics, etc. I can easily take it down when I need to get to stuff behind it, but that is where I store used college texts that I have listed on Amazon (daughter is in college).

Beside these two bookshelves is another unit, narrow (18") wide by 72" high, and same depth as the other unit (I'm thinking 14").  In it I store a hamper full of lincoln logs, plastic snap-shut storage containers for things like markers, crayons, colored pencils, ...educational games and things like Math Mouse, Cuisineaire rods, etc., and I actually am using a flower pot as a pen holder there as well.

In another spot in the family room  I have a 36" high narrow bookshelf that has some of my AO read-aloud books that I might integrate into my various TOG years, as well as other misc. books that are not TOG but we can't live without. Atop this unit is an electric pencil sharpener, an plastic storage bin (11" x 5" x 4") that holds sharpened pencils, and between the bin and the sharpener are pencils waiting to be sharpened.

My stored books are in a doored cabinet in a corner of the utility room until they are needed. My son is entering 6th, and he's my last, so that cabinet contains 7th grade and up materials for math, science, ...that type of thing, stuff I used with my daughters that I will use again when his turn comes around.

Just so you know, in case you were wondering, here is a picture of less than half of the books stored in my family room:

My friends who know me are nodding their heads, "Yeah, that's right!"  The other wing of my family room is too messy to photograph right now, but suffice it to say the only places without book cases in my "L" shaped family room are the door, the fireplace, and the stairs, plus one wall that has the sewing machine and the treadmill. To the left of the sewing machine is a bookcase, then the sewing machine, then the treadmill, then a bookcase!

A major goal of my life for the next ten years is to reduce, reduce, reduce the amount of books in my life. I do this by listing on Amazon.com.

Well, I'm having trouble getting some of my pictures to download from my phone, so I'll go ahead and post this now with the photos that I've gotten downloaded. Maybe I'll get the other photos loaded eventually...

Blessings, y'all!

Cleaning Day

Dear bloggy friends!

Thank you so much for subscribing to my blog. In the long run, I hope to make it an enjoyable subscription for you.

But here I went and took the week end off -- which I might do most of the time. But then I made it a long week-end! Actually, I have a meeting in my family room with the person who heads my new umbrella group for oversight. I looked around at my family room, where I do my school, and when I paused to see my "school corner" through the eyes of a visitor.... well.... AAAAAHHHHH!!!!!

So, after dinner I stashed and dashed and crammed and decluttered, and it still needs work, but now my family room looks like this:

 and the school corner now looks like:

 

 Not perfect, but much better. The lump on the floor in the photo with the fireplace is a dog toy, and there is a coffee table in front of the fireplace with a jigsaw puzzle on it. There are still school papers for filing. It's real life, but not panic mode like the first photo.

So that's what I did after homeschooling today. No crafting. No blogging. Just cleaning, then made and ate dinner, and then more cleaning. ::sigh:: Past my bedtime. Off to bed.

D